The Harry Potter author has taken part in a new interview in which she shared hidden details of huge donations she has made to support other people
A single black and white image moved JK Rowling so profoundly that it led her to give away £63 million, it has emerged. In a new interview, the Harry Potter author said that during the summer of 2004, she was sitting at her kitchen table reading a newspaper when she came across a striking image of a young boy with his head shaven and his face pushed against wire.
While she says her initial reaction to the image was to “turn the page” she forced herself to read the Sunday Times article. The boy, Vasek Knotek, was revealed to have been locked in a cage and in a piece on inhumane orphanages. In a new interview with The Sunday Times, Rowling said she has a “visceral reaction” when she sees children “abandoned, abused and alone” – and went on to make an enormous donation.
The mother of three said: “The image of that little boy screaming through what looked like chicken wire was so distressing. It remains burnt into my brain. I was pregnant with my youngest, and I think it hit me all the harder because of that.”
Rowling began lobbying the Czech ambassador to the UK as well as the Czech prime minister to spur change. She also wrote letters to the former director of fundraising for Save the Children, MEP Baroness Nicholoson of Winterbourne.
A year later, the pair started the Children’s High Level Group charity, which was renamed Lumos in 2010. Twenty-one years later, Rowling has now donated a total of £63 million to the charity through a combination of personal donations and through her successful Harry Potter franchise.
It is understood that the charity has assisted more than 280,000 children across Eastern Europe, Ukraine, Colombia, and Haiti. She highlighted the importance of her first-hand experience in seeing the early development of a child’s life, stating: “When that door closes, it’s very hard for children to develop into emotionally stable, functioning adults.
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“We now have 80 years of meticulous international research to show that institutionalised children have vastly poorer outcomes than children raised in families. So intervention is critical, and the earlier the better. Neglect not only causes cognitive harm, it exposes children to a higher risk of abuse and exploitation.”
She also described a visit to an orphanage in Prague in 2006 which led to a chance meeting with a young girl who sat on her lap showing signs of not being properly “nurtured”. This made her realise how easy it is for such neglected children to fall victim to abuse and trafficking.
Rowling herself experienced periods of financial struggle and hardships throughout her life. She grew up in what she described as a “lower middle class” family, Rowling said she escaped an abusive marriage in the early 90s and arrived in Edinburgh in 1993 when her daughter Jessica was only four months old.
During that period of her life, Rowling said she was about as poor as someone could have been in Britain at the time without falling into homelessness.
She added: “I literally went hungry at times because I prioritised feeding my daughter, but that wasn’t the worst of it. It’s the daily indignities — overwhelmingly, not being able to give your child the things you’d like. I remember meeting another mum whose son was the same age as my daughter.
“He had a roomful of toys. I had a shoebox in which Jessica’s two toys lived. It’s that kind of thing that really gets to you.”
Rowling has donated more than £86 million to support various projects around the world to alleviate social deprivation for women and children who Rowling says are at more of a risk of being in dangerous situations. Her first charity, Volant, which was set up in 2000, provides support for victims of domestic abuse, sexual abuse, and rape.
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The charity received a donation of more than £12 million in royalties in 2020 from her children’s fairytale The Ickabog which was used to help support vulnerable parents who were impacted by the Covid pandemic. It is understood that Vasek was successfully supported by Lumos in getting out of the Czech orphanage with social services in the country since improving significantly. Rowling said: “They stopped using caged beds as a result of our intervention, so that was a triumph.
“I’ve met a ton of children affiliated to Lumos who are now our advocates. They are beyond important voices in the campaign because they really tug at your heartstrings. Their stories are heart-rending.”
